Coyne v. Wright on the Evolution of “God”
By Sam Barr | August 19, 2009 at 8:52 amAt the New Republic, Jerry Coyne has a withering review of Robert Wright’s popular new book, The Evolution of God. In response, Wright has made a list of Coyne’s misrepresentations, which convinced me that Coyne should indeed have been more careful. But Wright’s response focuses on the “trees” (Coyne’s individual distortions) and leaves Coyne’s criticism of Wright’s “forest” intact.
To wit, Wright points out that Coyne took a quote out of context in order to attribute to Wright “the claim” that “God” is behind humanity’s moral progress. But of course Wright doesn’t “claim” any such thing; he only suggests that it is plausible, as shown by a passage quoted by Coyne that was not, it appears, taken out of context: “Maybe natural selection is an algorithm that is in some sense designed to get life to a point where it can do something — fulfill its goal, its purpose.” Wright thinks that that purpose might have been the achievement of moral order.
As Coyne says, and as I confirmed by reading Wright’s afterword (entitled “By the Way, What Is God?”), this focus on possibilities, as opposed to what we might call provabilities, is “characteristic of Wright’s intellectual style.” But talking about what is possible is almost never enlightening or fruitful. Wright admits as much when he says that a personal God “presumably” does not exist; what he means is that the possibility is not disprovable, but we can and should nevertheless discount it. But the same sort of skeptical approach to “possibilities” vitiates Wright’s own argument.
Now, as Coyne says, there are plenty of reasons to doubt whether humanity has evinced much moral order or progress. But Coyne is not an intellectual or religious historian, so it’s no surprise that Wright gets the pleasure of correcting him on such issues as “the evolution of monotheism,” “Christian inclusiveness,” “belligerence and tolerance in the Koran,” and “the Islamic doctrine of salvation.” But Coyne is a scientist, and the author of an excellent primer on evolution, so I was surprised that he didn’t take issue with Wright’s misrepresentation of natural selection, which turns out to be central to his justification for talking about “god” at all.
In his afterword, Wright imagines a dialectic between an “atheist scientist” (hello, Jerry Coyne) and a “believer.” He starts off by noting that his own “account of the moral direction of history has been a materialist account”: evolution produced the human brain, which produced technology, which allowed for the expansion of social organization, which likewise expanded our “moral imagination.” A totally plausible and godless account. “So why,” Wright asks rhetorically, “start talking about God?”
This is Wright’s believer’s response, and one can’t help but get the sense that it is also Wright’s: “[B]iologists agree that a strictly physical system or process—whose workings can be wholly explained in material terms—can have such extraordinary characteristics that it is fair to posit some special creative force as its source and ask about the nature of that force. Darwin inquired into the creative force behind plants and animals, and his answer was evolution. Surely the believer is entitled to ask the same question about evolution: Where did the amazing algorithm of natural selection come from?”
Well, natural selection is no more or less than the logical outcome of genetic variability and finite resources, neither of which seems particularly “extraordinary” or “amazing” to me. Perhaps this is not the “special explanation” for the “powerful mechanism” of natural selection that Wright has in mind. But of course Wright doesn’t use words like “special” and “extraordinary” innocently; they indicate that he has a bias towards unprovable, nonscientific explanations of where natural selection came from. The argument, if we can call it that, is fundamentally the same as William Paley’s infamous argument from design: some natural thing (for Paley it was the living organism, for Wright it is natural selection itself) is so darn complex and impressive that it just has to have a “special” (read: non-materialist) explanation.
For Wright, the discovery of natural selection merely forces believers to go a little further back into the infinite regress (i.e., but where did that come from?), but for less speculative souls, it did something far more powerful: it suggested that arguments of a particular form (this thing is complex, therefore God or “god” exists) were fundamentally misguided, and also that the more we know, the smaller “god” becomes, so that we might reasonably expect that he will eventually disappear entirely. Attempts to save some scrap of “god” from this onslaught of reason just end up begging the question: do we even recognize this “god” as “God” anymore, or should we maybe stop using that word entirely? For pointing out the tenuousness of Wright’s possibility-addled project, I’ll forgive Coyne’s misreadings and indiscretions.
Filed under: Current Events and Issues, Literature | Tags: Atheism, Biology, Evolution, God, history, Jerry Coyne, Morality, Natural Selection, Religion, Robert Wright, The Evolution of God, The New Republic, Theology | 7 Comments »
Natural selection as a phenomenon, as you correctly point out, is a thoroughly un-extraordinary mechanism. It is the results that are complex and therefore “extraordinary.”
What is amazing (to us) about evolution is the way its system of design differs from our human system. The way it makes things – with an input of lots of time and lots of material it takes simple things and adds complexity by trial and error – is antithetical to our own, which is to minimize trial and error by conceiving of something that will work and then building it. Nature doesn’t have the luxury of “conceiving” of things, and so has to build first and then test. In doing so, it manages to create complex things from simple things, which is something that humans have so far failed to do (every invention of the human brain is still simpler than that brain).
However, we are capable of understanding natural selection and all of its sub-principles, and even of harnessing them – witness some of the “directed evolution” efforts going on in modern labs, experiments that have, by automating and speeding up natural selection (with a scientist, instead of the threat of death, applying the selective pressure), at times resulted in things like enzymes with many times the activity nature has so far managed to achieve.
If it’s a principle we can understand and manipulate, then it’s less complex than our own minds. I see no requirement for a divine explanation for a system so simple. Its results are massively complicated, but we know what their source is. Still not a reason to turn around and hail that source, instead of its products, as divinely manufactured.
…
Unless there’s something I’m missing, like the fact that we still haven’t found a rock-solid (ha ha) fossil chain leading straight to modern man. Maybe evolution does work in ways that are divinely complex and far beyond my understanding, enabling it to hop over those gaps! In that case, sure, God, the ultimate directed evolution biochemist, did it. He was getting bored of the lemurs and wanted to speed up the process so that we could get to this debate a little faster. At least now there are living organisms considering the possibility of his existence. All those stupid lemurs did was eat leaves all day.
atheism is a belief – it is not evidence based and has no basis in science, just like theism is a belief and has no basis in science.
agnosticism is the only rational position to take on the question of the existence or not of a god – atheists are in exactly the same boat as believers – they have no proof and choose to believe anyway.
Wright’s ideas about “god” are about the evolution of the human understanding of god. it would be nice if any of the atheist hordes would actually read what he wrote.
Z, neither you nor I can prove that the world will not end tomorrow. Nevertheless, I’m betting that, just like me, you’re setting your alarm clock anyway.
(do you see the analogy?)
Bick Nodnar’s comments on the Coyne-Wright piece were an eye opener to me. Never before, and I say this sincerely, have I read such a pithy and lucid description of natural selection’s basic operating principle. That is, it was an eye opener except for Nodnar’s third paragraph, especially its two last sentences, which, to mix metaphors, left my head in a spin.
Maybe Nodnar, with his talent for the succinct, would not mind explaining the meaning of these sentences: “Its results are massively complicated, but we know what their sources are. Still not a reason to turn around and hail that source, instead of its products, as divinely manufactured.” As explained in my next paragraph, the source (no pun intended) of my confusion focuses on the word “instead.”
I take it that the “massive results” are the outcomes of natural selection (i.e., all living things). And the source we know about is — am I right? — again, natural selection, the engine that produces these massive results. Nodnar suggests that this knowledge of source and outcomes should not lead us to “hail that source as divinely inspired,” But before that he implies, in an aside, that instead we should hail its products (all living things) as divinely manufactured. If the source is not divine in some sense, how can its products be? Yes, I can understand being in awe of what natural selection is able to “manufacture,” but in my mind this doesn’t bring in the divine So at bottom, it’s the word “instead” ” that hangs me up. I might have used “nor” rather than “instead of.”
Fear not, Frederico. As a close associate of Bick’s, I can assure you that he would never argue for such a complete logical fallacy as “the source is simple, but the products are complex – and therefore the source is not divine, but the products are.” I believe in using the word “instead” he meant that creationists tend to retreat to the next best position each time their arguments are proven untenable, and so holding up natural selection “instead” of life itself as divinely inspired is their fallback position (something of which Wright is at least partially guilty).
I’m sure he would also appreciate your compliments on his description of Darwinian logic. I happen to know, however, that he failed his expository writing class as a college freshman, but did manage to ace genetics and molecular biology. So you’ll have to cut him some slack.
To a source close to Bick Bodnar:
Thank you for straightening me out on what Bick really meant when I questioned the logic of one of his assertions. I get the impression from your note that Bick is a young man, probably still in college and perhaps a bit wet yet behind the ears. I myself am, well, a person of some maturity, who spent a fair number of years in the early part of my career as a manager of communications (running newpapers, ghost writing speeches for executives, putting out press releases, etc.) for several very large corporations. Tell Bick not to be disturbed my misinterpretation. I found early on that readers will often interpret something 180 degrees opposite to what you as a writer are trying to say — even when syntax and choice of words are impeccable. (Boy, do I write like an old fogey!)
But if you happen to see Bick anytime soon, would you mind telling him that I have a more substantive question regarding his piece. He seems to place emphasis on the point that it’s nature’s way “to create complex things from simple things.” Well, that may be the way nature often works, but is he saying that evolution always proceeds in that fashion — from the simple to the complex? It seems to me, admitedly from what little I’ve read, is that evolution’s sole function is to preserve species and that the evolution process, as a force for adaption, has no intrinsic concern about whether what its doing is making simple things more complex or complex things more simple — its purpose, if one may be allowed such a word in this context, is survival of the species. Since, as you say, Bick has great talent for understanding genetics and molecular biology, perhaps he could straighten me, an old English major, out. Bottom line: are there any examples in bioglogy of evolution working successfully to assure the survival of some living form
by making it less complex in some way? Or, if there are no such examples, is this idea even theoretically plausible? Or maybe, as I half suspect, nature doesn’t recognize such man made concepts as “simple” and “complex” — it just does what has to be done, and it sometimes fails.
atheism is a belief – it is not evidence based and has no basis in science, just like theism is a belief and has no basis in science.
agnosticism is the only rational position to take on the question of the existence or not of a god – atheists are in exactly the same boat as believers – they have no proof and choose to believe anyway.
Wright’s ideas about “god” are about the evolution of the human understanding of god. it would be nice if any of the atheist hordes would actually read what he wrote.